Adventures of a multidimensional freak

This is Juan Julián Merelo Guervós English-language blog. He teaches computer science at the University of Granada, in southern Spain. Come back here to read about politics, technology, with a new twist

Having access as a subscriber to Time magazine archive gives you the advantage of checking out their extensive archive, which goes back to the fifties. It can be used for geo-ego surfing: looking for references to the city I now live in; and we find curious, and completely unknown, stories, such as this one, on prostitution in the fifties.

One of the modern reforms instituted by Spain's short-lived (1931-36) democratic republic was the outlawry of prostitution. When Dictator Franco seized power, he reinstituted prostitution, set a minimum age of 23 for admission to the profession, charged the police with responsibility for seeing that prostitutes were registered and had regular medical checkups. But Franco's police, tough on politicals, are lax with prostitutes: only 13,000 cardholders are on their books, but an estimated 100,000, many of them under 23, ply their trade freely. In many of the most elegant bars and cafés of Madrid, there are now so many women for hire that respectable caballeros no longer take their wives or fiancées to such places after 7 p.m. Spain has a frightening venereal-disease rate: some 200,000 cases annually in public dispensaries, an unknown number treated privately or not at all.

Alarmed by the increasing number of prostitutes passing through the University of Granada's Clinical Hospital, tall, bicycle-riding University Chaplain Father José Garcia two years ago set up a rehabilitation program which proved so successful that he began a nationwide crusade. Father Garcia fired off a circular to government ministers, church leaders and Roman Catholic intellectuals, denouncing legalized prostitution as "the major shame of the nation." The appeal brought only one response, but an important one: in Madrid, Jesuit Father José Maria Llanos, spiritual counselor of the Falange Youth Front, reprinted Father Garcia's circular in the Falangist daily Arriba, followed it up with a stinging column accusing Spain's upper classes of favoring prostitution as a means of protecting their own virtue. "The best people," said Father Llanos, "want to assure the beautiful innocence of their sons and daughters by means of a very original barricade, one constructed of the souls and bodies of thousands of poor women." Concluded Llanos: "This wall of flesh must go."